


The Persistence of Time

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005), The Hour
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-14
Updated: 2014-11-14
Packaged: 2018-02-25 07:53:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2614109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The TARDIS corridors are haunted by memories, even for Lix Storm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Persistence of Time

Bel and Freddie were never going to stay, so now had seemed as likely a time as any to drop them off and see them on their way to the best of a collaborative and productive future. At least that sounds good when Lix squeezes their hands and then pulls them in for a hug and a last, stray-hair-straightening once-over, and if nobody talks about how they've run out of reason to stay, that's for the best, and it's because there's nothing to say, nothing left except good bye. They're together, and that's something.

The TARDIS is very quiet after they've gone. The usual hums and pulses, the beeps and clicks, don't really make up for the palpable absence, thick as the air before a summer thunderstorm. 

Except the thunderstorm never comes; Lix wanders the emptiness, trying not to hate being alone, trying to pretend this is like a weekend at the office, Monday and its hubub just around the corner. She drinks countless cups of tea, walks miles in what passes for a day, never stops looking for the faces around the corner.

There are echoes, now and again. Whispers, projections of companions who have peopled these corridors, brought life, brought colour, brought laughter and opinions and conversation to the old man's self-imposed exile. They pop up when Lix least expects them, startlingly vivid sensations that feel like trespass, and transgression, and like she has walked into something alive and unbearably private. Something that trembles when she inadvertently touches it, unable to draw back.

There comes a point she thinks, _enough_ , and that night she dreams things she wouldn’t like to see again, wounded soldiers, dying boys, landscapes that weren't the fields and houses and city squares they used to be, stripped and ruined and flayed of life, vivisection of entire nations put on display while the populace marched by in daily homage. The starving dispossesed, eating ashes and drinking dust. An endless trickle of refugees, old women, young women; children and infants.

After that, the spectres she encounters are her own. She’s fortunate, relatively speaking. She hasn’t lost much, therefore she’s haunted by less. And while the images, harvested as they are from her mind, are photorealistic, there’s something less vivid about them. There’s no more of the uneasy suspicion that the TARDIS is sliding slices of time out of herself and moving them about, no vertiginous sensation of stepping out of one’s own reality through someone else’s, as though moving across one flowing current into another.

There’s only memory. She’s made a life of evading it, but it’s hunted her down, pursued her into this labyrinthine trap with its litany of love. Freddie is there, and Bel, and a lifetime of brilliant, tenacious colleagues, recent and not so recent. School chums and what few people she’d let in later in life sufficiently to call friends. She sees her father sometimes, and her younger sister. Clara Oswald. The dead of several wars. Her baby, in adoptive parents’ arms. Randall. 

Randall, studying a row of nitrate negatives, his brow furrowed. Randall staring nearsightedly into the distance with wind-blown hair and chapped lips. Randall as she had seen him the very first time, and in Paris, and the very last time in Spain, with Sophia. 

But it’s the Randall of years later Lix sees at last when she thinks she can’t stand it any more, all these escalating reminders down inescapable corridors. When she’s ready to run, to flee, to ditch her loyalties and abandon her promises; when she’s like a cornered animal with a hundred attackers worrying at her wounds, and she just can’t do it any more, it just hurts too much; when she’s searching frantically for the console room and the doors and she’s blind with the brimming tears--she turns the final corner, and there he is. His hair grey now, and short, and he’s sitting on a step with his head in his hands, and he’s shaking…

And Lix realises this isn’t Randall at all, it’s the Doctor: as soon as she notices the illusion, she can’t help but see it. They’re more like twins than doppelgängers, especially now she knows the Doctor so well, sometimes even less than twins, when the Doctor is his fully alien self, rather than the friendly curmudgeon he pretends to be. 

But today, they are more alike than different. 

(Unspeakable, helpless) grief, as Lix has learned, is not a solely human privilege. 

She approaches him quietly, with more wariness than she would have done with Randall, because ultimately Randall is hers, while the Doctor is something else. Where Randall was always a wild creature, fragile and nervous, the Doctor is a much more dangerous kind of wild, the kind with _teeth_ and fire and entire collapsing stars in his hearts. 

Lix sits on the step beside him, simply present. We’re not so alone, she means to say, _even with so many gone_. She lets the side of her arm just brush his, their shoulders touching. _There’s still you and me_. Eventually, he leans into her, but she can tell he’s struggling for control, defiant, determined. She reaches for his hand, and he grasps it, his skin, as always, shockingly cool. She strokes his knuckles with her thumb; it’s like a valve releases, and with a little gasp, all that pressure, all that pain comes rushing out. 

“It’s okay,” she says aloud--strange to hear a voice, even her own, for the first time in days--and as she says it she knows it is as much for herself as it is for him. ”Doctor, it’s okay to cry.”

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr flashfic, 18 July 2014. The prompt was "It's okay to cry..."


End file.
